Yalies Ask: Why Do They Hate Us?
06520 writes:
By now, everyone in America knows that Christine O’Donnell is not a witch. But that’s not the only thing the Republican Senate candidate from Delaware has going for her.
“I didn’t go to Yale, ” O’Donnell declares in a recent campaign commercial. Which made Anne Applebaum ’86 wonder. (How does O’Donnell afford those pearls? Nah, that’s our question.) Writing in em>Slate<, Applebaum asks: “Why do Americans resent upward mobility?”
By upward mobility, she means a specific path, typified by the rise of such luminaries as Barack and Michelle Obama and Clarence Thomas ’73JD, from humble origins to Ivy League diplomas and the highest echelons of American public life.
“These modern meritocrats are clearly not admired, or at least not for their upward mobility,” Applebaum writes:
"On the contrary . . . they are resented as “elitist.” Which is at some level strange. To study hard, to do well, to improve yourself—isn’t that the American dream?
To some extent, Applebaum notes, “the use of elite to describe the new meritocrats simply means that the word has lost its meaning.”
As Jacob Weisberg points out . . . it often means nothing more than “a person whose politics I don’t like,” or even “a person who is snobby.” But after listening to O’Donnell’s latest campaign ads — in which the Senate candidate declares proudly, “I didn’t go to Yale. . . . I’m YOU” — I think something deeper must be going on.
Bradley Bloch, writing at the Huffington Post, responds that Americans don’t resent upward mobility — “we just wish there was more of it.”
I suppose Applebaum — Yale alum, daughter of a Yale alum and holder of many of the meritocracy’s loftiest distinctions and honors (Phi Beta Kappa, Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, Oxford, etc.) — should get empathy points for acknowledging that those toiling outside meritocracy’s winner’s circle might find conditions “irritating, even painful.” But it’s worse than that. For many, it’s not just irritating or painful, but seemingly irreversible.
Seems to us there a couple of other factors, as well. In modern political discourse, the epithet “elite” is generally paired with “liberal.” Really, when was the last time you heard someone — of any political persuasion — deride Clarence Thomas, or Alaska’s Palin- and Tea Party-endorsed Senate candidate Joe Miller ’95JD, as elitist? It’s about as common as that old cliche about the fat cat Democratic robber baron.
And then there’s the O’Donnell sentence that Applebaum omitted. Right after “I didn’t go to Yale,” the non-witch says: “I didn’t inherit millions like my opponent,” Democrat Chris Coons ’92MAR, ’92JD.
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